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Thursday, August 09, 2007

A thought about paedobaptism

Partly provoked by Tim's stuff on anabaptism.

If Anabaptism is about discipleship more than belief, what's wrong with infant baptism? That is, a child can be discipled into the faith - initiated into their practices and commitments and language - and I know many people who have been raised in the church, have always been members of the church, and are perfectly sincere in their declarations of faith. It seems that the insistence on an adult baptism has behind it some sort of Modernist experiential bias, you've got to have had some sort of conversion in order to be a real Christian, the corollary of which is that a child cannot be a Christian. They are not part of the household of faith unless they have had a particular specifiable experience.

Which is a way of saying: is discipleship really as core to anabaptism as all that?